


Faraway Home

by t_fic (topaz), topaz, topaz119 (topaz)



Series: Closeout [3]
Category: NSYNC
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, M/M, Surfing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-28
Updated: 2011-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/t_fic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz119
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Justin hadn’t counted on was how much he liked having a place where everyone could crash, the place where everyone <i>did</i> crash.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faraway Home

**Author's Note:**

> For my Anonymous Reader. I went with your request for more of [Closeout](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2900). A present-day timestamp, most definitely inspired by the many surf movies required to get me through the winter.

If you asked Chris--which you actually didn’t have to, he’d tell you his opinion without any prompting--he’d say the place in Oz came to be because Justin had turned twenty-nine and was having a nervous breakdown about the “Big Three-Oh.” He claimed Joey and Lance agreed, ignoring Justin’s perfectly valid point that they’d never, you know, actually said it.

“Because, really, man,” Justin argued, “it’s not like they’d hold back on account of my feelings or anything.”

“Of course they aren’t saying so; they’re way too tactful and shit these days. Respectable.” Chris waved away Justin’s objections. “Doesn’t matter. We’re all pretty sure you’ve lost it, but don’t worry, Hellboy, we’ve got your back.”

Since Justin was half-in, half-out of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, fighting with a pipe that had gone from leaking to gushing in the space of a morning’s-worth of dishes, and Chris was “helping” by sitting on the floor with a giant can of Fosters and making fun of the whole process, Justin wasn’t really paying attention.

Lynn said it was because Justin had finally decided to stop running and put down roots. Justin thought--privately, because hi, he wasn’t entirely stupid--that buying a house in Australia when everybody he knew and loved lived in the opposite hemisphere wasn’t really the definition of not running, but then again, she’d been the only person to walk into the house and not feel the need to comment on how close to falling down it was. She’d stepped into the kitchen and taken a deep breath and smiled.

“It has such good energy, baby,” she’d said to Justin, and even with everything that needed to be done around the place, he’d felt it, too, right from the start.

C wasn’t the type to offer opinions on what other people did, but Justin knew he’d thought it was because of the yelling match they’d had, the one that had lasted pretty much all of the December before Justin turned twenty-nine, the one that had started mostly because it had gotten to the point where the time in between them seeing each other was twice as long as the time they did spend together; and then it kept going because once they got started they always reverted to the bad old ways. JC got icy; Justin got sulky; neither one of them talked. It sucked, and it scared Justin how easily they could turn into people who were just sharing space.

Justin wasn’t saying C was wrong, but him up and buying a falling-down farmhouse in Victoria, Australia, not far from Flinders, but not right on the beach, had way less to do with getting some distance from C and much, much more with closing the distance that was already there.

The truth was, between all the tour events scattered across the continent, Justin spent as much time in Australia as he did anywhere else. He’d offered to cut back on them, but C had gotten really quiet and had finally said that he hated that he was turning into a _It’s them or me_ cliche. Justin understood--he didn’t like it when JC hesitated to hit J-Bay or Mavericks just because it was one of the weeks Justin was in Hawaii. They were kind of stupid or something--Justin thought it was that they were feeling kind of defeated and weren’t thinking--but on one of the endless flights between Sydney and Honolulu, Justin finally figured out that there was no reason he couldn’t have a base in Australia, too. He thought it went without saying that he meant one where JC could feel at home, too, but when he told JC that, the flash of relief he saw in JC’s eyes maybe meant it was an even better idea than Justin had thought originally.

Of course, nobody who was looking for something easy and convenient, someplace where they could hang out for the month or so between the late winter/early spring stops on the tour actually needed a house and fifteen acres on the wrong side of the straight, so that it wasn’t even particularly convenient to when Justin was supposed to be surfing Bells for the RipCurl Pro, but shit happened sometime, especially when he had JC enabling him over the phone. C was always going to like the idea of walking out of his house and onto some land way better than a condo, no matter how plush, and every time Justin texted him another picture, he got more and more into it. Justin liked the idea of having a little bit of breathing room, plus, he guessed he really was Lynn’s kid after all--the place just _felt_ good to him. He signed the papers before he could talk himself out of it, and felt totally vindicated the first time JC saw the place for real, not long before sunset, at the end of two days of flights and endless miles in the truck Justin had bought to go along with the property.

“It’s not going to fall down around me, is it?” JC’s practical voice was completely at odds with his smile, the slow, brilliant one that had been killing Justin for more than half his life. It was a fair question, though, and one that Justin hurried to answer with the news that the inspector he’d hired had said it was all cosmetic and that the bones of the house were solid. That was all JC needed; he disappeared inside and when Justin found him ten minutes later, their stuff was scattered all over the bedroom on the second floor that looked out over the fields knee-high with grass. The ocean was just out of view over the rolling hills, but it was like JC could home in on it even if he couldn’t see it.

The fight had been predictable, and stupid, and all of the usual things their fights were, but it was rooted in reality, and Justin was really grateful JC was willing to go along with the whole crazy spend-half-the-year-in-Australia plan so they could be together long enough to sort through everything. So, if you asked Justin, he bought the house for them, and if he was really drunk, he’d probably admit that he thought of them as Them.

What he hadn’t counted on was the how much he liked having a place that everyone could crash at, the place everyone _did_ crash at. In Hawaii, yeah, sure, he stayed with Chris or his mom when he was on Oahu, or the guys would stay with him and JC if they were hitting any breaks on Maui, but everyone had their own places there. When they hit Oz, even if they were there for Perth and the breaks on the west coast, everyone detoured to Melbourne and made the trek south to the peninsula. They came and stayed, even if they were sleeping on air mattresses and taking mostly cold showers (the water heater wasn’t really up to more than two showers a day) because Lynn and Justin were right--the house had a great vibe to it and everybody felt it, even Chris.

So Justin woke up on his thirtieth birthday, three weeks before his next competition, in his own house, JC curled around him, and listened as Joey’ and Kelly’s girls ran up and down the stairs, chasing Christina’s little boy, while Chris clashed and clattered around in the kitchen. Lance was outside helping Lynn with something birthday related--Justin was fairly certain he was better off not knowing until it happened, but it apparently involved Lance stringing stuff through the tree outside Justin’s window--and Joey sang exaggerated love songs in the shower down the hall.

In couple of minutes, the noise would be too much for even C to ignore, and they’d get up and eat breakfast and load everyone and their boards into the cars and trucks and head over to Flinders and see what the break looked like for the day. It was going to be great, but just for just a little while longer, he let himself lie back and enjoy how the sun and the trees threw shadows over JC’s arm where it was draped across his hip, and laughed at himself, at how it took running across the world to figure out C was all he really needed to feel at home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to KC for the cheerleading support; and there's no way I could have done this without surfline.com or the surf movies of Woodshed Films. 


End file.
